Putting ads in a developer’s terminal sounds alarming — so the first thing worth saying about waitline is what it is not. It is not a tracker, not a background process mining your work, and not something that touches your code. It is one tasteful sponsored line in a place you’re already looking but not using: the wait line — the idle spinner Claude Code shows while a task runs.
Here is exactly why it stays safe and out of your way.
One line, nothing more
waitline occupies a single status-line slot. It does not pop modals, inject banners, play sound, or take over the screen. When there’s nothing to show, the line is blank. The whole surface area is one line of text and a clickable link — the smallest possible footprint for an ad, in space that would otherwise be dead air.
Creatives are sanitized before they ever reach your terminal
A terminal is powerful — escape sequences can move the cursor, recolor the screen, or hide text. So waitline treats every advertiser creative as untrusted and sanitizes it at serve time: control characters, ANSI escape sequences, DEL, and zero-width/BOM characters are stripped. The exact same rune set is enforced again in the client before rendering. An ad can only ever become one plain, visible line — never an instruction to your terminal.
It only runs when you opt in — with consent and a backup
waitline is a Claude Code plugin, and plugins can’t silently rewrite your settings. So setup is explicit: /waitline:setup shows you precisely what it will write to your settings.json, asks for consent, and keeps a verbatim backup of the original. Nothing is hidden. If you remove waitline, that backup restores your settings exactly as they were. (See setting up waitline in 60 seconds.)
Your work never leaves your machine
The client’s only network calls are: fetch an ad to show, and report view time (how long the line was actually on screen). It never sends your prompts, code, file names, or command output. The thing being measured is attention to the ad — not anything about what you’re doing.
Honest by design
Because the business pays developers 50% of every impression, waitline has every incentive to keep the experience clean: an ad people resent is an ad people remove, and a removed line earns nothing. Quality isn’t a nice-to-have here — it’s the product.
That’s the whole deal: one line, sanitized, consented, removable, and blind to your work. Sponsored, but on your terms.